Sunday was not a day to hang about: as the day began, the weather was filthy. This was a day for getting the chores done quickly and then run for the cover of home and a nice, warm cup of tea.

Carlos Alcaraz, more used to the gentler climes of Murcia (where it was 31 degrees and sunny), was certainly in no mood to waste any time but Ugo Humbert had other ideas.

He threw everything he had in his kitbag at the defending champion and kept him on court for nearly three hours, but it was all for nothing: Alcaraz came through 6-3, 6-4, 1-6, 7-5.

How then, would he describe his performance?

“Unbelievable, I guess,” he said. “I felt great playing today. I felt I played to a really high level. I just try to fight every ball, every point. It doesn’t matter which part of the court I am. Just to give myself the chance to still be alive in the point. I fight until the last point – just to fight.”

Just to add a little spice to the encounter, there were bragging rights at stake for the defending champion. Should he reach the quarter-finals, his ninth at Grand Slam level, he would join his coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, in joint third place in the list of Spaniards to have achieved such a feat.

Such little side competitions can help relieve the tension of the occasion, especially when a chap has not been playing at his absolute best in every round. And when Alcaraz fired a running backhand around the net post and landed the ball on a postage stamp in the far corner of the court, he turned to his team and stared at his coach. Did you see that, boss? JCF had seen it all right; he misses nothing.

Humbert posed a different challenge to the world No.3 – he is left-handed. Although Alcaraz had beaten all six of the lefties he had faced in other Grand Slams – and had won 24 of 32 matches against southpaws in all – his only previous encounter with a lefthander on a grass court came a couple of weeks ago. And he lost that to Jack Draper at Queen’s Club.

“Playing lefties is always tricky,” Alcaraz said. “At Queen’s I played my first against a lefty one so I guess I learned a little bit from that match."

The Frenchman is no novice on this surface. He reached the semi-finals in ‘s-Hertogenbosch at the start of the grass court swing and won the title in Halle three years ago. As he set to work, it was easy to see how he had done it, too.

Like many hopefuls here, he can do all the usual things well but he is also clever: he was able to move Alcaraz around, he was willing to race forward at any opportunity. In the second set, he was giving the champion all sorts of problems.

He waited for 61 minutes to earn his first break point of the match and then, like London buses, four came along at once. In a nine-minute game, he pushed and he pushed and he pushed but still Alcaraz would not fall. Once that game had trickled through his racket strings, you did fear for Humbert’s chances.

Sure enough, as it came to the sharp end of the set, Alcaraz pounced. By using the simple tactic of chasing every ball until it was dead, he broke the Frenchman’s serve again and was two sets in front. Humbert had had four break points and converted none of them; Alcaraz had had five and taken three. Simples.

And then everything changed. Humbert threw caution to the wind and went for broke on every return; he attacked the net again and again. And he broke the Alcaraz serve three times in a row to take the third set.

There was no let up in the fourth set, either. Alcaraz broke; Humbert broke straight back. Another exchange of breaks took them to 3-3 and when the Frenchman manufactured another three break points, Alcaraz turned to his box for a rant.

It went something along the lines of “he is shredding my every serve: what am I supposed to do?” With that out of his system, he held from 0-40 down and suddenly found his range on his ferocious forehand and touch on his drop shot. The danger had been averted: he broke again and was on his way to the quarter-finals.